Comprising members of White Ward, Soen, Naoni Orchestra and others, this Ukrainian band combines black metal with melodic death metal, progressive metal and traditional folk singing and instrumentation. The album is about an individual’s journey through darkness and disappointment towards enlightenment. It almost seems too simplistic a theme, given the mix of promised styles and the number of artists involved. I counted fourteen of them, most appearing on one or two tracks and adding ethnic vocals or providing those traditional instruments, namely the hurdy-gurdy, duduk, bandura and tsymbaly.
After a quiet acoustic opener, “The Era of Stagnant Gods” is a battering world of hissing death metal, interrupted by a fluty section before returning to the matter of aggression and fire. Harshness combines with mystical folk ambiance. Next is the thumping progression of “Todestrieb”. The march-like growling that we witnessed on “The Era of Stagnant Gods” is here again, as is the diversion into a dark fairytale world with beguiling instruments and commentary. There’s a mild resemblance to Moonsorrow in ambiance but musically this has a more diverse range and with a chorus of vocalists it’s like a group of embattled warmongers giving rise to song. The music has structure, melody and punch. The control of the progression comes across as loose, although I’m sure it’s deliberate.
“Opulent Mirage” takes a diversion into a quiet acoustic passage. A Ukrainian voice cries distantly. There’s a hint of sadness before the metal returns, combining with a strange chant which brings this song to an end. “The Mortality Archway” takes on a conventional death metal front, at least to the brief and expected introduction of strange instruments just over a minute in. Then it’s back to the death metal romp for another minute, a break and a slow and heavy continuation. What I was hearing here was a lot of dissonant passages, none of them bad but to me at least unrelated to each other. After a short folksy interlude, “Lightkeeper” comes in at the lighter end of the melodic metal spectrum, enhanced by growly vocals and plenty of bass guitar. A choir of mystical angels takes us to a higher place, before the heavy and the light alternate. To finish we’re back to the heavy melodic beginning. It’s all very mystifying. I thought the title song was going to stick to its musical agenda, transforming from a folk song into rock, but the heavy growls change the mood before the folk aura returns. I suppose it’s avant-garde in its way and there is some overlap but the purpose of it is not apparent and it lacks coherence. The final piece “Dissolving” bears no relation to the rest of it. It is a sombre cosmic journey composed by Solar Kollapse, complete with obscure sounds and deep sound waves. Had it been associated with anything else it would have been fine but this was like listening to a piece from an entirely different work.
I found this frustrating and hard to listen to. For me, “Celestial Shine” was anything and everything, neither one thing nor the other. It just bounced around from one style to another, and although there was melody, heaviness and folk, I just couldn’t detect any coherent flow and was unable to make any sense of it.
(4/10 Andrew Doherty)
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